Joomla Code Commits vs Drupal and Wordpress

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Oct

2008

Joomla Code Commits vs Drupal and Wordpress

Written by Steve Burge

Someone mentioned to me this week that they were worried about Joomla because not much work was being done on the project's code.

To reassure them I headed over to Ohloh.net which keeps useful data on the amount of work done on open source projects. What I found was that work on Joomla proceeds very differently from both Drupal and Wordpress:

Where as those projects are built incrementally with small changes, Joomla has great bursts of energy followed by relatively quiet periods. We're just on of those plateaus now as the project gets ready for Joomla 1.6.
Joomla has had over four times more code contributions than it's rivals, in a much shorter period of time.

Joomla Code Commits

Drupal Code Commits

Wordpress Code Commits

Comments

#1 Flavio Copes 2008-10-15 14:19

Nice stats.. not much work was being done on the project's code?

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#2 aravot aravot 2008-10-15 15:51

How about a comparison between Joomla and Elxis

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#3 Steve Burge 2008-10-15 15:54

Elxis? Ohloh gives them no love.

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#4 aravot aravot 2008-10-15 16:01

I meant feature/usability comparison by Alledia

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#5 Rob Clayburn. 2008-10-15 16:59

could it be that they are developing on branches which aren't logged by Ohloh and then committing a whole branch at at time?

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#6 Rowan 2008-10-16 03:06

This doesn't represent the number of code commits, It's the size of the project's codebase.

You can see that Drupal and Wordpress's codebases have been gradually increasing in size (with minor dips), while Joomla grows over a short period of time and then stagnates.

The total number of commits according to Ohloh is:
Joomla: 13206
Drupal: 8461
Wordpress: 8088

That's not "over four times more code contributions", it's over four times the size of the other projects! I presume most of Joomla's 2008 growth comes from splitting up all the template files. It doesn't look like much has happened since then either.

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#7 Robert Wetzlmayr 2008-10-16 06:22

Looks like the graphs are representing a very different conclusion than what your post tried to indicate.

Even commit counts would not express anything meaningful as there's no indication at all of how many lines of code, bug fixes and security breaches one commit contained. Never trust any statistics unless you faked it yourself...

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#8 Steve Burge 2008-10-16 07:32

Hi Robert, Rob, Rowan

I agree that these stats need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but I stand by what they say overall ... that people shouldn't worry if Joomla's SVN is quiet at the moment. Joomla proceeds with big leaps whereas the other two projects show much more incremental growth. Neither strategy is better, but I think this is an important difference between them.

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